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Virtual Canuck

Emergency Distance Education

Written by terrya
4 Comments

Each day brings news of more cancellations of social events. In many areas schools have closed and it seems as likely as not, that many campus based schools will be closing for ???? days/weeks.  This is the black swan event that most financially pressed colleges didn’t really have the energy to think about. But now it is upon us.  This creates both opportunity and challenge. In this post provide personal recommendations for an emergency move to online education.  The unprecedented opportunity to learn from a crash course on distance education in a networked era.

All of these closures has resulted in many posts designed by pundits, institutions and companies offering advice to teachers scrambling to very quickly move a course on line- in the middle of the term.  See for example Tony Bates’ Advice to those about to teach online because of the corona-virus or  Stephen Downs’ Quick Tech Guide and Cornell’s University’s Preparing for Alternative Course Delivery during Covid-19.   The challenges of going online VERY quickly are not unrelated to the task of “Building an Airplane in the sky” as documented in the famous EDS advertisement!  Thus, I add to the list of advice columns with the post below.

The good news is that digitization is already in place across most campuses – likely both students and faculty are enrolled in an institutional Learning Management System (LMS) – (if not this should be a top administrative priority) or an institutional wide network on Google or another provider.  There are a host of private and open source environments that would likely jump at the chance to host your course – perhaps even for free. Doing so is likely a very bad idea – unless there is absolutely no institutional system to safeguard emails, recordings and confidential marks. This is NOT the time to blazing innovation on the latest social software platform.  Rather it is a time to get a course up running very quickly.

You can think of your course on the LMS as your own mini learning environment or classroom. When you think of the activities that go on in your campus classroom now, try to find a tool that allows you to meet that same, or very similar learning goals and learning activities – only online.  For example, if you regularly use student presentations you can teach students how to be presenters on a webconference or to record and then share videos they can make with their phones.  A good place to start looking for tools is the tool library in your MOODLE, BlackBoard, or Canvas LMS. It likely has tools for small groups discussions, quizzes, blogs, micro blogging, collaborative writing, gallery of photos and more.

Some wealthier and larger institutions may have classroom lecture capture systems that can be used to record your lectures,  Oh yeah –  your campus is closed. A simpler idea is to record a video – at home using your laptop with the built in microphone.  This does not yield high definition television quality video – but it works.  Again if you are lucky your institution has a contract with a video streaming service- if not you can always use YouTube.

These recorded and streamed videos of course are available 7X24, but watching video doesn’t have the same engagement and commitment value that arises when class and teacher gather online in real time.  Especially, if you are taking an existing campus course online, a great tool to use is webconferencing.  Web conferencing supports the real time presentation of content that defines many classrooms. However, in addition it supports student break out groups, text discussions, comments and questions and a host of quiz and drawing tools.

In education we have a long history of video conferencing (as distinct from webconferencing) courses. These courses using dedicated classrooms and very expensive technology – most of which was prone to breakdown.  Current web conferencing tools like ZOOM, Adobe Connect, Big Blue Button and others can overcome many of the restraints of older technologies. These systems are great for classes up to around 60 students. The technology itself may scale beyond 60, but managing large lecture theatre takes more skill than seminar or classroom sized groups.  Do remember that all of the students will likely not show up for each scheduled class.  This is fine as you can record the interactions, and they can replay them when they wish to do so.

Cornell teaching communications chart

In the screen shoot above from Cornell University you can see how only three tools (Canvas LMS, Zoom webconferencing, and email),  that are readily available to all teaching staff, can cover almost all the communications demands of a quality online education.

When designing and talking about online courses, I often think of the Community of Inquiry Model (COI) developed by Randy Garrison, Walter Archer at the beginning of the online course era. The strength of the COI model is its simplicity and capacity to act as guiding heuristic for online teachers.  The model suggests that quality learning happens when three educational components (teaching, social and cognitive presence) are present in the online environment.

The-Community-of-Inquiry-CoI-Model

Community of Inquiry (COI) model

In an emergency online course, it is important for the teacher to quickly develop and nourish teaching presence. This means being present and especially in the first few days or weeks to be online daily. Second is to insure continuity of the course by posting dates and learning tasks for the remainder of the term.  Although many courses run asynchronously, a great way to kick start teaching and social presence in an emergency course is with a real time class, using webconferencing tools described above. At minimum, the teacher should record a video, explaining how the course will continues in the near future.

Social presence creates a sense of security, support and humour.  It is done by providing a space for students to meet and greet online, to ask questions, to chat about concerns with each other – as well the professor. The LMS is well developed to handle this informal interaction  – think of causal conversation outside the physical classroom as well as creating a comfort zone where students can readily ask questions and express concerns.

Finally cognitive presence is the reason the course continues.  The teacher stimulates cognitive presence by creating dynamic presentations, asking triggering questions for both individuals and small groups, monitoring interactions to clear up any misconceptions and challenges students to find ways to create applied knowledge from the information they are acquiring in the class.

Emergency courses often don’t have the luxury of time to create new content. Thus, the savvy teacher quickly checks out available open educational resources, that can be incorporated into the course. Teacher’s often think of OERs only as open textbooks and indeed, there are thousands of open text books available for free download and editing. In addition, there is a growing number of simulations, games, lab exercises, videos and graphics free for the asking.  If you are fortunate there may be a dedicated OER support unit on your campus that you can contact for help finding resources. However there are many OER repositories and George Mason University runs a free OER Metafinder searchable data base.

The coming months will see lots of uncertainty and financial challenges for many, however these viruses tend to come and eventually to go.  Hopefully the experience, for both students and teachers, will provide a healthy does of online education literacy.

 

 

Community of Inquiry, Distance Education, OERs, Uncategorized

A visit to the University of South Africa (UNISA) 2019

Written by terrya
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A visit to the University of South Africa (UNISA) 2019

Last summer I was asked to join a “quality audit” team that had been created by the Commonwealth of Learning and contracted by the University of South Africa (UNISA) to do a Trail Audit.  This process involved a trip to London and this month a trip to Petoria, SA. In this post I talk about UNISA, about my experiences (to which I am not accustomed) in business class and a brief encounter with the South African medial system.

The University of South Africa

The first thing you might notice from the picture below and when driving into Petoria from Johannesburg airport, is the imposing campus of the UNISA. This is the main campus in Petoria which is augmented by  a network of regional offices and campuses spread throughout the country.  Unisa boast over 340,000 students making it the largest university  in the Southern hemisphere.  All of the undergraduates work from home, businesses or regional offices. Thus, the campus houses faculty, a huge printing press, library and offices for graduate students – of which there are also thousands.

The University will be audited in 2020 by the Council on Higher Education (CHE) which is the accreditation and regularity agency of the Government of South Africa.  In preparation for this Quality audit, the University contracted with COL to undertake a pre-trial quality audit.

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UNISA Choir entertains

 

Unisa was the first university in South Africa from which all of the other universities spun off. Unisa  was established by the Brits in 1873 after the University of London model in which no teaching is does, but they set curriculum and examine students who learn however they can. Nelson Mandela is their most famous grad.  In  1947 the University started creating print packages, thus becoming the worlds’ first distance eduction institution.  They have begun huge (34% of all postsecondary students in South Africa) and largest university in Africa. They  are struggling to move from an Open and Distance Learning (ODL) university to an Open and Distance Electronic Learning (ODeL) university – with a zillion challenges.  One of which is figuring out if they should abandon their printing presses (largest print shop in the southern hemisphere). The print shop has a warehouse sized “Vault” in which they guard the final exams, since they are terrified of  ”leaks” , by which Mafia types obtain final exams and sell them a few days before the exams are written – all across the country on the same exam days.  They have testing centres in Johannesburg that sit 2,000 students, at a time, 3 sessions a day.  This places them – like most higher education institutions very vulnerable to academic fraud.

Our 6 person team was led by the President of COL and consisted of Professors from South Africa, Tanzania, India, Mauritius and Canada. and with interest in quality standards, technology, student support, African universities and African Open Universities. During the week of our visit we interviewed about 300 people – from President to many students, on main campus and 5 regional centres. The idea of hiring a group of outsiders to audit a whole Universities quality standards just doesn’t happen in Canada, so I really didn’t know what to expect.  A really striking feature of the project was the posters, banners, meals, banquets and pomp and circumstances about this audit and our visit . Quite surprising to see notes on our arrival displayed all over the campuses we visited.

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Gala Goodbye banquet with Jazz Quartet

The University (and the 5 particular programs that we selected for detailed review) undertook a self-evaluation (300 + pages of text) before our arrival. On the final afternoon we provided our initial findings to a cast of a few hundred. This presentation focused on areas lsuch as  quality assurance measures, teaching and learning (my area), technology used, research capability etc. etc. Our report seemed to be well received – but how much credibility can you give to a self evaluation and 5 day visit by group of outsiders? Now we go home and pour through the notes from 2 scribes hired to record everything and then create (and have them verify) a final report.  The report will have both commendations (what we impressed by) and recommendations (suggestions for improvement).

Adventures in Business Class.

Last March I had Speaking trip to South Africa as an invited keynote speaker at UNISA’s annual research week. Thus, I was well aware of the challenges of 23 hours in the air and another 10 so getting to, and switching airports. Thus, the offer to repeat the journey this month- but in business class was a real incentive. I got to savour the service on three different airlines (Westjet, KLM and Virgin Air).  The trip from Edmonton in December involves travelling through two nights.  Of course they treat business class passengers with a lot more choice and comfort than I’m used to in coach.  I relaxed and actually fell asleep in 3 types of “sleeping pods”.  The biggest surprise was opening the duffle bag at my seat on Virgin Air, thinking it would be the too small blanket that I would wrestle myself under. But no! It was a pair of flannel pyjamas – Like I am going to get into pyjamas and walk down the aisle – NOT!

The food was great – they even had a standup bar with snacks on the 747!  But I didn’t do much but read, NOT drink too much, watch a couple of good movies and then sleep!  I arrived at 11:00 PM Sunday and we had our first meeting at 7:30 AM the next day, so I didn’t have any time for jet lag.  Getting a good sleep on the airplane seems to have almost eliminated jet lag – at least on this trip for me!

carbon footprint

Now getting to the hard part – the carbon footprint.  You may have read the data that the extra carbon cost of business class and I don’t doubt it is true.  So I have little excuse, except to hope that our recommendations will impact the lives of 340,000 students at UNISA.  And that that will make a difference.

 

My Encounter with South Africa and It’s Health Care System

South Africa is (at least by Canadian standards) a pretty scary place. Very visible poverty and unemployment are clearly visible. The protection industry is thriving guards (mostly unarmed), barbed wire, police cars and groups of people in the streets are everywhere. Alongside the poverty are miles of gated and fenced (and I mean big fences) communities.  Thus there are many living in pretty severe poverty, while the evolving middle class (both whites and blacks) lives at least partially in a culture of fear. The scary irony is that the country (with its opportunities!) attracts thousands of economic refugees daily from other African countries.

I also had an adventure with the South African medical system. Two days after my arrival I started getting a pain in my lower leg, this continued into a purple rash that kept growing.  I figured I better get it checked in case it was flesh eating disease or something worse!  UNISA staff took me to the University Health clinic where the nurse suggested I should see a doctor. The clinic  referred me to a hospital, but my hosts figured it would be too long of a wait so we travelled way into the burbs to a health clinic where I had an appointment with two doctors.  It was weird entering the strip mall clinic (open 24 hours a day) and seeing signs in both Africans and English and staff of all races – expect the doctors that I saw were both white.

They pretty quickly diagnosed the rash as shingles, but they also did all kinds of pressing and pushing, blood test, heart stuff etc. I walked out with 3 prescriptions and a bill for about $100 Canadian total. Ironically, I had had a shingles c=vaccine four years ago, but I have come understand the chicken pox/shingles virus (they are the same critter) can erupt at any time from those who have chicken pox in their lifetime.  I didn’t really understand the contagion issue with shingles at the time and so thought it best to cancel my one-day safari  trip to see the lions. Fortunately it rained anyways, but we were told that when it rains when visitors come, it is a very good omen!

So South Africa seems to have a great health care system – IF you have money.  This clinic was nearby the gated community where the black vice president who was hosting us  lived, so we dropped him off at his home. He had a card to open the gate and let us drive into his house, but when we went to leave, the guards wouldn’t let me and the black driver out!! We had to drive back to the VP’s house and get him to verify that we hadn’t ransacked his house.

My flight home was uneventful- the best kind.

I hope you have enjoyed this brief chronicle of the trip.

Distance Education, Travel,

Type S (social) Interaction Revisited

Written by terrya

I’ve spent a few hours reading and thinking about pedagogy and LARGE student numbers in anticipation of my upcoming work on a Commonwealth of Learning quality assessment team headed for University of South Africa (UNISA). For those not familiar with UNISA it is the world’s oldest, exclusively (single mode) distance education university and a mega-university (330,000 students).

My UNISA friend Paul Prinsloo referred me to a couple of recent works by Thomas Hulsmann. Thomas is a German academic who spent a few years post-retirement at UNISA. Hulsmann has an extensive publication record that focuses on cost effectiveness of various DE delivery. He has published a COL review (Hulsmann, 2016) The Impact of ICT on the Costs and Economics of Distance Education: A Review of the Literature in which he examines the costs of distance education (in many forms from correspondence to e-learning).

I was intrigued to find in his literature review the identification of the shift in my perspective from earlier days when Randy Garrison and I developed the Community of Inquiry model.  He notes my shift from a focus on “traditional” student-teacher interaction (constructivist paradigm) to are more pragmatic “any interaction can work” – as in my Interaction Equivalency Theorem. He even highlights the only time that Randy and I shared (in print) differences of opinion about  “big distance education“. Anyways, I am pleased to know that my PhD supervisor, colleague, Dean and co-author Randy Garrison and I remain good friends – even if we have diverged in pedagogical terms,

In this review Hulsmann revisits his earlier work identifying interaction as the key cost variable and identifies two distinct models of interaction. Type I is interaction with Information (or content – from books, to web sites, to simulations and everything in between). Type C is for Communications with humans (usually focused on expensive student- teacher interaction). Type I interaction is scalable in that variable costs do not rise with additional students. In contrast Type C communications costs with teachers increase with every student enrolled.

I then moved to a 2016 article Hulsmann wrote with Shabalala (Hülsmann & Shabalala, 2016) to look at cost issues associated with ten “signature courses” developed at UNISA.  These ten courses added formative feedback (time consuming for tutors) and attempted to support computer conference interactions amongst students.  By North American standards the course numbers (each tutor responsible for 3 classes of 60 students each) were very high and the workload for mostly part-time tutors to complete both conference moderation and marking far exceeded what they were paid for.  Hulsmann and Shabalala again use his Type I and Type C lens to show that interaction (of any type) is expensive and not always possible in educating very large numbers of students – at an affordable cost. They do note (and I heartedly agree) that the use of multiple-choice quiz questions, with feedback, could have provided the formative assessment without increasing tutor workload, as is done routinely in MOOCs.

They also hint, but don’t develop the possibility that students could provide their own network support.  The course designers were influenced by Heutagogy thinking and assumed (hoped??) that students would be able to become self-directed knowledge seekers and builders. However the primary technique used was reported as having the tutor pull back from active ‘teaching’. Not a challenging assignment for overworked tutors!

The signature courses had some success. The courses resulted in higher grades and higher completion than normal UNISA courses, but the sustainability of the model is questionable.

This discussion of interaction costs took me back to a chapter I published in 2008  (Anderson, 2008) Social Software technologies in distance education: Maximizing student freedoms. I wrote this chapter partially in response to Hulsmann’s model. I introduced an emergent type of interaction that I labelled as type S – for Social Interaction. It was entertaining to review this 12 year old work and my overview of the promise (without today’s perils) of social networking as a type of interaction that goes beyond Hulsman’s type C. Social networking thrives on many-to-many interactions and benefits from networked effects, crowd evaluations, persistence beyond a single course and the near ubiquity of relatively low cost availability- even in many developing countries.  I illustrated the place of Type S below.

ishot-118

In the nearly decade that I and Jon Dron developed a type S system (Athabasca Landing) we never really won the institutional (or many teachers’) support that we had hoped for, but the system persists today.

I remain convinced that we need to develop learning activities and the skill and motivations of both teachers and learners to exploit the potential of type S interaction. Equipping students with the tools and the skills to develop networks for both learning and personal support is of critical importance – not only for cost effective distance education, but also for effective life-long learning.

Bibliography

Anderson, T. (2008). Social Software technologies in Distance Education: Maximizing Learning Freedom. In Evans. T, M. Haughey, & D. Murphy (Eds.), International Handbook of Distance Learning (pp. 167–184). Bingley, UK: Emerald.

Hulsmann, T. (2016). The Impact of ICT on the Costs and Economics of Distance Education: A Review of the Literature. Retrieved from http://oasis.col.org/handle/11599/2047

Hülsmann, T., & Shabalala, L. (2016). Workload and interaction: Unisa’s signature courses – a design template for transitioning to online DE? Distance Education, 37(2), 224–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2016.1191408

Distance Education

A Systematic Review of the EQuiv Theory

Written by terrya

In this post I review an article that provides the first systematic review of the Interaction Equivalency Theory (EQuiv) that I formulated 15 years ago. The article is:

Graham, C., & Massyn, L. (2019). Interaction Equivalency Theorem: Towards Interaction Support of Non-Traditional Doctoral Students. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 14, 187-216.  https://www.informingscience.org/Publications/4238?Source=%2FJournals%2FIJDS%2FArticles%3FVolume%3D0-0.

Personal Introduction

In 2003 I published an article in which I wrestled with the increased capacity for interaction that was becoming available to those of us designing online courses.  I realized that synchronous, asynchronous, text, video, voice, mutli media, “smart” content and many more tools and toys were becoming available and flogged by ed tech companies. I also realized that many of these tools were expensive both in terms of money to purchase and support and in the time they took for both students and teachers to first learn to use, and then to effectively use.  Perhaps I was being both simplistic and reductivist, but I speculated that though interaction is critically important in distance education, it can take many forms and further that one form can substitute for another. Building on Michael Moore’s notions of student-student, student-teacher and student-content interactions, I gave a very fancy name (Anderson’s Interaction Equivalency Theory) to the idea that if you could have a high level of one of these student interactions, you could reduce or even eliminate the other two. I further contented that adding the remaining two forms, may increase learning and persistence, but it would be more expensive (time and money). 

The article was submitted and published: 

Anderson, T. (2003a). Getting the mix right again: An updated and theoretical rationale for interaction. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 4(2), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v4i2.149

I got a few comments on the article and gradually noticed that others were quoting the article (not all positively) and a few researchers were using it in their conceptual rationale for their work.  I see today that Google Scholar lists 934 citations to the article. So I was pleased with its modest interest and use. But I wasn’t even convinced myself it was entirely true. Like too many educational (and theological) theories, it could be used to explain a result in  hindsight, but it is very challenging to design and implement experiments that could falsify  the theory.  

Partially to increase the validity and value of research in education that does not necessarily use control groups and other positivist methods, systematic reviews have recently become more widely used (for example see Martin, F., Ahlgrim-Delzell, L., & Budhrani, K. (2017). Systematic Review of Two Decades (1995 to 2014) of Research on Synchronous Online Learning) Thus, I was really pleased to see the first systematic review of the Equiv. Theory.  

The Graham & Massyn  (2019) article comes from Connie Graham’s PhD Thesis and is authored  with her supervisor Liezel Massyn from the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa.

Systematic Review Methodology

Like any good research project, this one starts with the research question . “How can the EQuiv be used to enhance interaction opportunities of non-traditional doctoral students?” It then provides the selection keywords (key words like doctoral education, EQuiv, interaction, non traditional students etc.) that were used to query the major journal databases and dissertation indices.  The papers were further weaned to to focus on ones in  which interaction and non-traditional doctoral students were highlighted, with or without the EQuiv Theory. 

 The context of this research is also of considerable personal interest to me, as I helped design, taught and researched with ‘non-traditional’ EdD students, studying at a distance, at Athabasca University.  The paper is really three mini-systematic reviews rolled into one.  The first is a review of issues related to non-traditional doctoral students. This section reviews studies that relate  to completion, supervisor- student relationships, risk factors for dropout etc.  The next section reviews interaction requirements in education in general and specifically with doctoral students. The final section  reviews the EQuiv theory itself.

1. Doctoral studies with non traditional students

The doctoral research hones in on the often mythical relationship between the student and the supervisor. The the teacher’s role in this relationship has been described as “mentor” “master” ‘supervisor’. Graham & Massyn use the term ‘master-apprentice’ to describe  the ideal form of this relationship. This relationship originally evolved on campus-based universities. At its best the student not only acquires content knowledge but also is socialized into the profession. This is accomplished by regular planned and spontaneous interactions between master and the apprentice doctoral students.  This master/apprenticeship relationship is used in the training of doctoral candidates to help them to gain a deep understanding and opportunity to participate in the culture of their discipline tribe.  This  model/design has hundreds of years of university replication baring evidence that it can work.  However, the Internet came along and caused us learn how to use mediated communications to create Equiv learning and socialization outcomes. 

If we look at a typical doctoral student in the USA and in Canada today, they are studying all or some of  their program online. In addition there are a myriad student-student online support interactions using social media.  These students don’t often sit around the graduate coffee room and don’t get to be personally present when the cultural activities of the discipline are presented. However, they may (or may not) be meeting regularly with their supervisor via Skype, be following each others tweets and blog posts, and be following similar research topics or developments in their respective networks and forwarding them to each other.  In addition they may be networking with professors and other graduate students around the world thus creating a new form of connected doctoral student. 

Neither the “sitting at the knee” master-apprentice  model nor the “connected model” works out in reality. Today the master is as often not on campus and private office conversations seem hard to arrange. Doctoral students have many demands on their time from vocation, family and health and are not readily available to benefit from face-to-face encounters. 

On the other end, the master is often using different tools (University versus commercial provision) or prides themselves on NOT being on social media.  Thus, the amount of personal interaction and socialization is extremely varied in today’s doctoral programs.  This article begs the question, If the traditional student-teacher (master-apprentice) interaction is impaired does the Equiv theory help us to design compensatory interactions?

2. Interaction in Doctoral Education- especially at a distance

The second section deals with interaction in education with a focus on non traditional doctoral students. It is a good overview of this critical role of interaction in all modes of formal education. The usual student-teacher, student-student and student-content interactions are reviewed. I especially liked the section on student-institution interactions. I’ve usually considered this a subsection of student-content interaction.  Especially for doctoral students an efficient and comprehensive web site or portal is critical to answer detailed procedural questions that every student bumps into. How many people of the candidacy examination committee?  Which of the Faculty members would be the best member of my supervision committee?  In days past these questions could be answered by informal conversation among grad students or hints from “the master”. But today a good web site is much more effective . 

3. Interaction Equivalency

The third section of the review (longest and one of most interest to me) is on interaction equivalency.  The review notes the earlier work by Simonson, Schlosser, & Hanson, 1999, that describes the necessity for distance education students having the “equivalent” experience in education as their campus based colleagues. This use of the equivalency  in Simonson et al’ article is not what I had in mind. Distance education is not ‘equivalent’ to campus education in the sense that some experiences both on campus and off are not experienced by those not engaged in that mode. A lecture is NOT identical to a videocast, but they may  have identical outcomes.  Demanding literal ‘equivalence’ denies the unique affordances of both the live performance and highly mediated interactions.

The review then does a really good job of explaining the theory with some of the diagrams created by my colleague Terumi Miyazoe.  

Graham and Massyn found a total of 25 papers directly using the Equiv theory that they summarize.  The authors create a table in which they categorize and give examples of  12 different characteristics of the research papers such as  learning method, type of students, interactions etc.  None of the studies seem to directly falsify or uniquivacably support the theory, but most give a sense that it is a useful tool to think through a problem.  As expected, the results are a bit inconclusive or as they state in the conclusion  “the literature on the EQuiv is contextual, relative, and inconclusive.”  This is not surprising as the Equiv is perhaps best used as a diagnostic or mnemonic aide to design and learning enhancement. One of the authors noted correctly that we never really provided a precise way to measure “high” or “low” levels and thus researchers have been forced to create their own metrics. And really, this is all I really wanted from the “theory”.  Equiv is a designers’ (or teacher’s tool) that can and has inspired some empirical research but perhaps is best classed and measured by its efficacy as a design tool.

In the summary, Graham and Massyn present a new graphic that illustrates the Equiv in doctoral studies.

The dotted line shows potential (or likelihood) of  challenges in quantity and quality of interactions with teacher that are routinely faced by non traditional, distance students.  The diagram shows how an intervention, with enhanced S2S, S2T or S2C interaction, can address this deficiency and lead to social and academic integration and thus successful educational experiences.

To conclude, congratulations to Graham and Massyn for a useful contribution to the Equiv and by extensive online learning literature. As they note its use in the important and growing area of doctoral research, at a distance, is very under researched and there is lots of interest and room for ideas on how to make this experience more effective – for students, teachers and institutions. 

Distance Education, interaction equivalency theory, My Work

Visit to University of South Africa (UNISA)

Written by terrya

This is my second and final post on my winter-buster visit to Open Universidat Aberta in Portugal and my visit last week to the University of South Africa (UniSA). 

Although I have been to South Africa before I had never had the opportunity to visit the world’s oldest distance education university!  Unisa is HUGE – I heard varying numbers ranging from 375,000 to 450,000 students. The variations relate in part deciding if a student should be counted if they take a term off, can’t afford tuition or are otherwise not currently enrolled in a course, though still actively enrolled in a program of studies. In any case, courses with 15-20,000 concurrent students are not unknown.  Given my experience of distance education systems two whole order of magnitudes smaller than those Unisa deals with made me wonder if I was the right expert to be addressing these distance education colleagues. 

Unisa has numerous student centres around the country but the flagship reigns like a giant space ship on the hill as you enter the capital city of Petoria. It is a huge building and begs the question of who is actually there if the students are all at a distance.  I came to understand that UNISA is also major provider of Masters and especially PhD students, many (or most) of whom are resident at Unisa. And in addition the number of staff to develop, support and deliver courses on this scale, also requires huge number of office spaces.

Each year Unisa organizes a research week in which they invite one or more keynote speakers to kick of the week and then each of the faculties is expected to convene a series of presentations, roundtables, keynotes and panel sessions focused on research related to the theme, from their discipline perspective.  This was the first time that the research week had focused on Open and Distance Learning (ODL) research itself.  I find that this lack of focus and energy on what makes distance education unique a bit puzzling. However, I realize that Unisa like too many other distance education institutions hires faculty and is judged, not by the research nor the quality of their ODL programming, but by the research in traditional disciplines – similar to campus based universities. Thus myself, my good friend and co-author Olaf Zawacki-Ricter from Germany and a new friend Christine Ofulue from Nigeria Open University were invited as keynotes.

They certainly put us to work. Besides the opening keynote and panel discussion, Olaf and I did two half day workshops on research theory and techniques, I did two other keynotes at the Business and Graduate Studies Colleges and 3 more panel discussions. All and all it was a bit much, but on the plus side, we were treated royally with many a fine restaurant meal and opportunity to socialize with colleagues.

At the research Awards Gala with Colleagues

The university also arranged a half-day visit to Johannesburg where we visited the infamous Fort Jail where both Nelson Mandala and Mahatma Gandhi had been imprisoned. The prison tour graphically illustrated the almost unbelievable cruelty inflicted by both white and black wardens on the prisoners. But even more shocking was the differential treatment down to food rationing, showering and actual square sleeping space given to the highly segregated prison blocks. Black prisoners ate their extremely meager food from unwashed plates, sitting on the bare concrete only feet away from open and often overflowing latrines. Of course some of the prisoners were convicted of theft and other crimes but many were being held (up to 180 days without charge or trial) for political activities or even for being outside an area to which you were constrained by their pass book.

This sobering tour was relieved by a quick tour of the South African Supreme Court, building – a building constructed from bricks of the old cell blocks on the same Jail site. The Court building is rich in symbolism, such as the building pillars resembling a tree under which the traditional chief would meet with citizens to dispense justice.  The courtroom itself was slightly sunk into the ground and very narrow windows on the side that allowed judges to see only the legs from the knee down of pedestrians walking between buildings. This view encouraged judges, lawyers and visitors to acknowledge persons but not to be able to judge them based upon their gender, their nationality, their religion or their cultural or tribal background.

Windows at the Supreme Court, walls from bricks of old cell blocks

We then drove through Johannesburg – the only major city in the world not established on a river, lake or sea-coast. The city was established to serve the gold and later coal and diamond mines in the area. I knew the City had a mining history, but I didn’t realize the city was actually on the mines, with great piles of slag visible as we drove through the suburbs. Our tour guide even talked of illegal mining still going on within the city and the near calamity of a major natural gas line being disturbed by blasting from illegal miners within the city limits.

Our tour ended with a visit to the Apartheid Museum. Though of course I am old enough to remember reading newspaper accounts of the Soweto uprisings, the Sharpville Massacre,  the murder of Steve Biko, Nelsons Manadal’s release from prison and other headlines, I never really understand the all encompassing pervasiveness of the attempt to rule a country based on racial origins.  I also came to understand the forces of industrialization on under educated whites and the fear that drove them to try to maintain their excusive privilege – much as the Trump supporters today struggle to regain hegemony and long lost wealth and influence.  On the plane home I read a book about a police spy and his successful penetration of white anti-apartheid organizations both internally and outside South Africa. I had no idea of the relentless war conducted by the South African police to murder and imprison activists,  both black and white, within and outside of the country. 

I also had time to consider the strategic efforts of Unisa to ‘Africanize’ the curriculum. During one of the panel sessions, one young, white, female academic asked the panel members if Africanization of the curriculum meant that it had to be taught by black Africans.  The response from the panelists was unclear. However noting the complete absence of any but black Africans in executive positions and a few private conversations makes me realize that the wounds of colonialism and racism will take a very long time to heal.

Distance Education, Travel, Uncategorized

Seven Editors Best Picks

Written by terrya

From the special issues of Distance et Médiations des Savoirs -Sous la direction de Martine Vidal

This post is designed first to celebrate this multi-journal innovative and cost effective means to enhance Distance Education (DE) scholarship. Secondly, I provide a very brief overview and annotation of each of the 7 articles in the special issue.

Congratulations and thanks to Martine Vidal for pulling off her second international scholarly collaboration in the field of open and distance education (see her 2008 DMS earlier collaboration of the Right to Education. Martine’s idea in designing Seven sister journals – seven international contributions to distance learning, was to invite the editors of seven internationaly known, peer reviewed DE journals to select the most important article from their journal in the past 15 years.  The editors were asked to select a significant contribution either to research, practice or both.  The resulting special issue appeared (under Creative Commons license) this month online.

Of course, I intended to immediately write this post as a tribute and a review when I saw the issue online. But alas time got in the way, and I may have negleted the task, as I didn’t really read the complete artciles until a free paper copy of the journal arrived in my mailbox.  What does that say about paper vs. electronic journals?

Likely there are readers (including you?)  who think this issue might be of interest, but will you really get around to reading these journal articles??

Hopefully, you can scan through this review and follow a link to the paper that you think sounds most interesting to your teaching, learning or researching – or all three.

I should note that  Distance et Médiations des Savoirs is usually a French language journal, so additional thanks to the DMS staff and editors for producing this  bilingual journal.

In order as they appear in the special issue:

1. IRRODL  Intro by Terry Anderson

Alfred P. Rovai Building Sense of Community at a Distance The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, [S.l.], v. 3, n. 1, apr. 2002

Like the other editors,  we had to consider what constituted the “best article” over 15 years of IRRODL production. First, I went to Open Journal System stats to check out the download numbers. This provides a pretty good estimate of “crowd sourcing”. However, it is biased towards older articles that have had longer time period to gain downloads. Next, I checked some of the top cited articles on Google Scholar and finally,  of course, we used our bundle of personal prejudices and  preferences to pick a winner. 

We choose Rovia’s 2002 article because it dug into the conceptual basis for the growing interest in distance education, not as independent study, but as an example of community operating at a distance.  Rovai’s article led to a companion piece in which he introduced his 20-item Classroom Community Scale that provides empirical measurement of the community experienced by DE learners.  In the introduction I couldn’t help but compare it to the Community of Inquiry model (developed just a few years earlier by Randy Garrison, Walter Archer and myself) and speculated on the greater use and citations of the COI model.  

The Rovai article does an excellent job of a overviewing the conceptual base for 7 dimensions of community- from trust, spirit common expectations to interaction. It goes on to isolate factors of interaction including transactional distance, social presence, social equity and actives associated with the learning design.

2. Asian Association of Distance Education Ramesh C. Sharma 

Fred Lockwood A Ladder of Publication: Scaffolding for emergent authors. Asian J D E 2003 vol 1, no 1, pp 5-11. Asian Journal of Distance Education 2007 vol 5, no 3, pp 10 – 27

Ramesh C. Sharma et Mohana Kumar Rajesh Tutor-Marked Assignments: Evaluation of Monitoring in India [Texte intégral]

Editor Ramesh Sharma choose two articles from the Asian Journal of DE. The first by Fred Lockwood provides a ladder model (moving up from seminars and workshops through chapter and articles to books), to describe the steps necessary to successfully publish and distribute scholarly research article.  It is striking to note the absence of discussion of open access publishing and its advantages, but then the article was written in 2003, long before open publishing culture and even Creative Commons was established. 

A bit strangely, Sharma choose one of his own articles for the second entry. This article examined the results from tutor marking and assessments of hypothetical DE students at Indira Gandhi Open University.  This empirical study looked at the nature and quality of the comments left by tutors after they had engaged in a professional development “orientation”. It is perhaps unfortunate that the study didn’t look at real assessments and feedback, rather than those produced to provide feedback on an anonymous assignment after the workshop – thus detracting from the face validity of the research.

3. EuropeanJournal of Open, Distance and E-Learning (EURODL)

Ulf-D. Ehlers Quality in e-Learning from a Learner’s Perspective. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, May 2004

Editor Uli Bernath choose a great article that overviews the complex issue of quality in learning.  Quality remains a focus, even though so ill and variously defined by all the educational stakeholders – including students. Thus, an article that focuses on learners’ perspective is especially useful.  In an era of increasing opportunity and individual responsibility for life-long learning, understanding what learners perceive as the most important features of e-learning experience is invaluable. The article covers both qualitative and quantitative data to produce 30 dimensions of quality. Generally my head begins to spin when talking about more than three dimensions – so thirty is a bit challenging. Fortunately, Ehlerscondenses these to 7 themes. He then presents data using cluster analysis to try to understand the different criteria for assessing quality by different crowds (aggregates of interests in a DE course).

4. DMS Distances et médiations des savoirs (DMS)

Jacques Béziat Formateur en ligne : vers un modèle d’action Distances et médiations des savoirs, n°1, Décembre 2012. Trainer Online: Towards an Action Model

Monique Grandbastien, Pierre Moeglin et Daniel Peraya  The host editors of DMS provide a nice description of how and why they chose this article.

This article discusses the role of the “trainer” – in this case I think it is like the tutor in a large-scale DE environment.  Unfortunately, my unilingual handicap meant it was much easier reading this French article through Google Translate (great improvement on translating the full article since last I checked!!!).  This model presented and validated, to some extent, (with very small N survey data) the teachers’ role in a paced DE program with synchronous and asynchronous sessions. The model gives a picture of the various types of actions encountered and required by trainers in this context.

5. Open Praxis

Inés Gil Jaurena, editor of Open Praxis introduces (for a number of well explained reasons) her selection of:

Sandra Peter et Markus Deimann On the role of openness in education: A historical reconstruction Open Praxis, vol. 5 issue 1, January–March 2013, pp. 7–14

Given the very long association with DE and openness – a linkage, that continues to grow to this day, is useful to examine the historical perspective – especially to us old guys! In their romp from late medieval to modern times, the authors note the evolving meaning and the various dimensions of openness. They also “highlight the danger of emphasizing one aspect of openness while backgrounding others and how unrestricted practices can quickly and repeatedly become institutionalized”(p. 6)  The article is now over 5 years old but I think there many discussions and technological innovations yet to come to contribute to our openness knowledge and practice in DE.

6. International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education

Irwin DeVries provides a nice little essay that I couldn’t help but love, as it has“my name all over it” literally. In this selection we see a second reference to the valued perspective of the student, as opposed to the teacher, employer, government or institutional perspective

IJDE chose Penny Rush Isolation and Connection: The Experience of Distance Education International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education, La revue internationale de l’apprentissage en ligne et de l’enseignement à, Vol 30, n° 2 (2015).

This work analyzes a survey administered  in 2014 to 1002 students enrolled in DEprograms at the University of Tasmania. The analysis of the open-endedquestions reveals what students both like and dislike about DE. As expectedcommon themes for advantages centre on flexibility, self determination,location independence and necessity (the only choice, given life circumstance).Also unsurprisingly, disadvantages include lack of support from theinstitution, isolation and challenges of self-reliance and balancing busy lies.Major suggestions for improvement include more resources, more contact and more communications.

7. Open Education Research

Zhihui Wei introduces Ye Zhonghai, Zhang Yong et Ma Lihua. A Historical Overview of China’s Learning City Construction: Since the 1990’s.Open Education Research, vol. 1, No. 1, 2015

I confess to be quite out of words to describe this article from the Chinese Journal Open Education Research. The article is supposedly about how Smart Cities were designed, planned and implemented in China. However, even after reading the translated version (twice!), I have no idea how a “smart city” is defined, how exactly they function, how they are evaluated etc. etc. I did get LOTS of preaching, politically correct best practices and directions –supposedly for creation of best smart cities, but nothing that really struck me as scholarly rationale nor much of any evidence. Typically, the talk on security measures notes the smart learning organization “is associated with planning, guiding, evaluating, coordinating, supervising, and securing” But again, I have no idea what Smart Cities in China actually organize.

I looked through the titles of Open Educational Research in their archives of 24 years, and I see a lot of interesting titles- related to DE. I also could not locate this particular article as the reference in the special issue (and Google scholar) is incorrect- it isn’t in Vol 1 2015, or even volume Vol 19 1 2015. So I may be losing a lot in translation, but this is by far the weakest article in this special edition.

Conclusion 

I think anyone with a strong interest in improving either practice or theory of DE will learn from and enjoy this special issue. It is nice to see global perspectives and to note the commonality of interests that we share.  I also really liked the mix of empirical results, “think pieces” and historical pieces. This is especially fortunate to get this mix as no one knew before hand what articles would be submitted. Please see links below for more detailed summaries of the seven articles. – or better yet – read the articles yourself!

For more detailed reviews please see the final articles in the special issue by Emmanuelle Voulgre and Clément Dussarps

Distance Education, IRRODL, Open Scholarship

New Book from AUPress – An Online Doctorate for Researching Professionals

Written by terrya
New Book from AUPress – An Online Doctorate for Researching Professionals

coverI was pleased to receive in the post a hard copy of a new book in the Issues in Distance Education book series, for which I continue to serve as the series editor. Now of course you can read all of the books in this series as they are available for download  under Creative Commons licensing. But it is nice to hold paper copy and a purchase ($39.95 Can.) makes the press and the authors happy (think $$$).

An Online Doctorate for Researching Professionals: Program Design, Implementation, and Evaluation by Swapna Kumar and Kara Dawson  is a great book on a very hot topic. I would characterize this monograph as a scholarly case study. This means that it is in large part a detailed explanation of a 5 year old Education Doctorate (EdD) program from the University of Florida.  The book begins with a historical review of function and form of the doctorate program in Universities. I was surprised to hear that the very first Doctor of Education program was begun here in Canada at the University of Toronto. But it was soon followed by many doctorate programs – in professional subjects such as medicine, dentistry, law and of course education.

Kumar and Dawson make the point that a professional degree(s) exists to train professionals to make contribution and conduct research into the profession and to the citizens that they serve. It was not then, and is not now, designed to train students to be full time researcher scholars nor faculty members at Universities – this is what the PhD is designed for.  This all makes sense EXCEPT that the public and many students perceive the PhD to be a “better’ degree, so the pressure from students, the public and the Universities to move towards offering PhD programs- regardless of the need of either the academy or the profession.

I note the topic is hot, not only for this contention of what a professional doctorate is, how it differs from a PhD but also because of degree inflation. Many professionals desire (or are required) to have the advanced training and the status of a doctoral title. As noted the professional doctorate in education is hardly a new degree, but at least when I began doctoral studies in 1987, there were no EdD or PhD programs available in Canada that one could complete without ‘residence’ attendance on campus.  The EdD program that I worked in and helped design at Athabasca University was one of the first to enter this domain, but it was soon followed by many other programs including the subject of this case study.

The first thing I did after opening the book was jump to the chapter “Dissertations in the Online Environment”  The dissertation is a defining characteristic of any doctoral program and the most challenging to deliver, to support and to complete.  It is not particularly difficult to design a program of courses  that are delivered online or that use some blended approach. But the dissertation process is individualized. This  not only challenges the student to design and undertake quality, original research but also challenges the faculty as a great deal of one-to-one support and mentoring is required of the supervisor and then a committee of examiners.  The economy of scale of courseware all of a sudden disappears and faculty can be overwhelmed with the work- especially as the number of candidates/faculty creeps into two digits.

The book is chock full of examples of ‘good practices” and a description of the research tools used to validate them that emerged and were implemented in the UF program.  I should be pleased to note that the pedagogical approach is grounded in Randy Garrison, Walter Archer and my- Community of Inquiry model – with the addition of Shea’s ‘learner presence’. In addition the program focuses on building community (and measuring it using Rovai’s (2002) community instrument. However, these days I am more intrigued with ways to develop self-directed and self-driven learning programs.  But perhaps that is too much to hope for, given the intense context and content to be mastered and the high expectations of doctoral studies. Indeed, the authors provide a quote from one student who notes that they were prepared for the intellectual rigour of the program, but blown away by the “opportunity to work alongside such incredible peers that has been more rewarding and fulfilling than I could have imagined.”  This intense community benefits (and is nurtured) in an entry ‘boot camp’, annual F2F meetings and regular synchronous and asynchronous classes.  Perhaps the search for  of a recognized, self directed, self-managed, MOOC-like doctorate is Quixotic!

To summarize, this a great text and I am proud to see it added to the AUPress Issues in Distance Education Series.  It is a scholarly exposition of an innovative doctoral program and as importantly it validates the findings with survey, completion data and examples from the cohorts. It also serves as fine example of the type of study and reflection that should accompany all new educational innovations.

Congrats to Swapna and Kara!

Community of Inquiry, Distance Education, Uncategorized

Qualitative Research Rebooted 2018

Written by terrya
Qualitative Research Rebooted 2018

For the past two months, I’ve been occupied with a qualitative study of teachers’ use of digital technology in Alberta Schools. The study is sponsored by the Alberta Teachers’ Association.  It has been very useful for me to get down to actually doing a full scale qualitative study after years of teaching grad students research methods courses and advising and supervising graduate students.

This post is to highlight (and celebrate) two great tools that we have used that I think have almost revolutionary, or at least potentially disruptive effect on interview based research.

For this study we conducted 19 interviews mostly via Skype or Google Hangout, but also face-to-face and two on the old-fashioned telephone.  We recorded the interviews using a variety of digital tools included with Skype or Hangout or recording apps on our machines. We also used a portable digital recorder as backup. The MP3 recordings were then uploaded to new tool – Trint.com

Trint is an automatic transcription tool, which converts the audio track to text.  We uploaded the approx. 50 minute recordings and received notification about 15 minutes later when they had been transcribed to English texts.  As expected, the transcription failed (and sometimes comically) at transcribing proper nouns and other slang or colloquial terms relevant only to specialized audiences. The genius of the system is the editor within which the new text transcription is then displayed. This specialized editor has an audio track at the bottom, that reads aloud the audio track. You can vary the audio playback speed that then highlights on the screen the first draft transcription.  This editor allowed us to add speaker’s name, insert or delete paragraph breaks, search and replace, delete extraneous chatter and of course has a built-in spell checker.  The initial editing took us  about the same length of time as the recording runs. So,  we went from an Mp3 Audio recording of 50 minutes of clean text in about an hour.

We did however notice significant variation in the accuracy of the transcription and thus the length of time needed to manually edit the transcription. The recordings that were done through Skype or Hangout, were very accurate and required minimal editing. Those we recorded on the phone, produced much worse transcription, requiring us to edit and re edit as we listened to the actual interview. Thus, as Trint notes on their home page, the quality of the recording is critical to success.

Trint has an interesting pricing system, that after the first $10 free credit, charges are based upon the length of the transcription submitted. The cost is $15 US per hour, but we were pleasantly surprised that the cost was significantly lower than the actual length of our recordings. So this was money very well spent compared to shipping the transcripts to India or hiring professionals here in Canada. I’ve heard that professional cost for transcription can easy mount to over $300 per hour.

Once we had the text transcript, we uploaded to the cloud-based analysis program Dedoose. Dedoose.com, is not a new program, but has some interesting features that are certainly an improvement on my earlier work with Atlas and NVivo.

First, Dedoose is designed for coding teams. It has extensive tools for training and then testing inter-coder reliability. Next, is the general ease (not too bad a learning curve) of the coding itself. We were quite easily able to code, create new codes, arrange them in families and other functions of high quality qualitative analysis tool set. Finally, Dedoose’s has an integrated suite of quantitive tools. These allow you to look at any significant differences between subjects based on a host of ‘descriptors’ such as gender, school size or whatever variables the research chooses to associate with each of the interviewees.  Of course, such quantitative analysis is only meaningful if the coding is done systematically and reliably – a challenge to the very epistemological validity of the subjective experience of qualitative coding. Nonetheless, Dedoose worked as advertised and the coding was straight forward. Retrieval of the code excerpts to a Word file was also quite easy.

Dedoose also has an interesting pricing system. An account is billed (after the free trial) at $14.95 (US)/month – BUT only for the months in which the program is used. I was pleased to see the system remembered my account from over 2 years ago- and I am awaiting to see my monthly charge appear on my credit card.

Now I am looking for a program that writes up the research, recommendations and implications for practice and further research.

 

 

Distance Education, Research Methods

More on Distance Education Journal Rankings

Written by terrya

Both academics and administrators love to argue about the value (impact) of their academic work.  The old adage of “Publish or Perish” still has currency. Despite the many distribution opportunities besides and beyond publishing in scholarly journals, the bean counters (myself included) love citation indexes. The basic idea is that the more your work is cited or used by other scholars, the more impact it has had on the field.  Especially since the onslote of predatory open-access journals that support themselves through publishing fees with minimal peer -review, the decision as to where to send one’s work and the prestige, value and exposure involved in its publication, depends a great deal on the Journal. Work published in prestigious journals is distributed more widely – but of course, these journals also get more submissions, so acceptance is usually more difficult.

Thus, the better authors, submit better work, to better journals – creating a lockin of prestige that favours the older and more established journals.  Given this landscape, how does a new journal both attract quality submissions and then see that the work is widely distributed, such that it is cited by other researchers?

In this post I highlight some of the factors that lead to the success of the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL)

In our case, it was helpful that the discipline is relatively new and expanding – certainly the context of distance, open and online education has expanded since 2001 when IRRODL was founded. It turns out that being an early adopter of online (only) and open access were also critical decisions. Being online only, meant that our distribution and production costs were significantly lower than paper only or dual media publications. Secondly, by allowing free and open access, we allowed scholars from around the world to read our publications, without needing subscription purchases, going to physical libraries or finding our work through proprietary indexes or scholarly database systems. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we had a sponsor (in our case Athabasca University) who felt that the focus of the journal matched well and supported the strategic mission of this relatively new and totally online university.

During the ten years that I served as Editor, we fought many battles with funders, authors, software systems and ourselves!, but we managed to attract a growing numbers of subscribers, authors and reviewers.  A very significant move was as early adopters of Canada’s Open Journal System (OJS), that coordinates review and publication processes. OJS has come to be, by a  wide margin, the world’s most widely used journal publication system – offering open access systems for free in many languages.

So, where are in 2018?

The major commercial journal publishers (notably Scopus and Social Science Citation Index) provide listings of the citation metrics from major scholarly journals in all fields.  These are used as a numeric indicator quality of the journal and the articles published. These ratings are calculated using a variety of metrics but basically they count the average number of times an article published in a journal is referenced or cited by others (now including automated systems). These indexes can be modified to discount self publications, to include a measure of the annual number of publications and the prestige of the journals in which the work is cited and other factors designed to enhance the validity of the count – thus the different column headings in the table below.

The current co-editor of IRRODL Rory McGreal has gathered recent (2017) data from Scopius to produce the table below see .

Journal Title

Acronym

Cite Score

SJR

SNIP

Rank
Journal of Research on Technology in Education
JRTE
3.03
1.435
1.593
1
Educational Technology Research and Development
ETRD
2.79
1.31
1.913
2
British Journal of Educational Technology
BJTE
2.74
1.333
1.815
3
International Review of Open and Distributed Learning
IRRODL
2.5
1.034
1.632
4
Open Access
Educational Technology and Society
ETS
2.47
1.103
1.719
4
Distance Education
DE
2.36
1.001
1.632
6
Australasian Journal of Educational Technology
AJET
1.42
0.854
1.035
7
Technology Pedagogy and Education
TPE
1.4
0.844
1.412
8
International Journal of Technology in Higher Education
IJTHE
1.33
0.425
0.928
9
Open Access
American Journal of Distance Education
AJDE
0.9
0.522
0.72
10
Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education
TOJDE
0.36
0.233
0.559
11
Open Access
International Journal of Distance Education Technologies
IJDET
0.47
0.157
0.328
11
Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology
TOJET
0.32
0.218
0.514
11
Open Access

At one time, is was useful to discount comparison with educational technology journals as the focus of learning design, technology used and delivery was quite distinct between campus and distributed contexts. Today, in an era of blended and extensive technology use both on and off campus, these distinctions are much less meaningful.  By this old distinction, IROODL (followed closely by Australia’s Distance Education) is the most widely cited (of about 20 – not listed here) distance education journals.  The table shows that IRRODL continues to gain ground on the older and more established educational technology journals.

Also of interest is to note that 3 of the 14 journals offer their products freely to all. – giving evidence that publication in an open journal does not result in lower citations.

However it isn’t all that simple. Rory McGreal has informed me that TOJET is not open access in that their freely READABLE articles carry an “all rights reserved” tag.  This of course begs the question of how ‘open’ does ‘open’ have to be?

The gold seal that is supported by the DOAJ  calls for journal articles to “using Creative Commons Attribute (CCA) only.  Adding restrictions such as Non Commercial (CCNC) or non derivative (CCND) means that anyone can still read and cite the work but they can’t change or sell it and there may be other restrictions on re-use.  David Wiley argues that we need to clarify the definition of OER to allow for “free access to the resource” which at least from an end user’s perspective amounts to open access – though it may NOT allow for reuse, re-sale or other purposes. However,  Stephen Downs notes “It’s a clever argument but has the unpalatable consequence that a resource might not be available to anyone and yet still, by this definition, be classified as an OER.”

I’ll not resolve this issue in this post, but I’ve always favoured the rights and convenience to use a product over those seeking to re-use or benefit commercially. From my pragmatic perspective and much as I think that re-use and repurposing of digital media is a major problem in education, serving the needs of end users (students, actual teachers) shouldn’t be compromised by endless debates over ownership. However, I’ve been in enough useless arguments over software ownership by academic developers to know that CC licensing is a game changer for collaborative production. That is why there are a number of licences. Let’s not limit the right for anyone to benefit from the work in order to protect all possible rights of the creator.

Finally, let me address the now old argument  (first made to me by my PhD supervisor) that publishing only online, will limit the distribution of the work.  Open publication results in the work being more widely distributed- especially to practitioners and research audiences from developing worlds or in industry or K12 schools where journal access is often restricted due to costs.

Finally, It should be noted that a growing number of the proprietary journals publishers  (some in the table above) allow individual authors to “free” their work by submitting a publication fee – often around $2,000. This isn’t of too much value to educational researchers who rarely have an extra $2,000 lying around – or needing to be spent from a research grant!

So congrats again to IRRODL, to OJS and to Athabasca University for helping open quality scholarship to the world!

Distance Education, IRRODL, Open Scholarship